It’s been some busy days at Linden Lab. But interestingly enough, we’re seeing a quite different way of leadership, and this is truly encouraging (even if does not lead to immediate results!).

You might remember that we all speculated what Rod Humble, with his background in games, would do with Linden Lab and Second Life. While the immediate “gamification of Second Life” — a heresy to most veteran residents! — was a hypothesis, the rest was not very clear. We all know that Second Life is not really a “game development platform”. Not only the renderer is not up to modern engines, but programming fast action games is tremendously difficult (when not outright impossible); region space is outrageously expensive; and avatar limits prevent large-scale battles to be fought in the same region. Even if all these problems were theoretically solved, lag, the Eternal Beast of the Apocalypse, would be so overwhelming to make any “game” a ridiculous pretense (just imagine that SL’s engine would have been replaced by CryEngine 3 overnight, a thousand avatars could be on the same region, there were no memory limits on running scripts and no artificial delays on them, and whole regions would cost less U$9.95/month).

In spite of all that, what Rod and his team found out is that there are, indeed, people doing exactly those kinds of games in Second Life.